German rock song writer and musician, Steve Brockmann has recently announced a new metal music project, VISION OF CHOICE. Now he has revealed the singer for this project who is Lukas Remus (EPILIRIUM).
Steve commented: “I am happy to announce that I’ve finally found the singer for my upcoming metal project Vision of Choice – he is the vocalist from Epilirium, Lukas Remus!
I saw Lukas perform with his band at the Grailknight’s Grailfest in Hanover, and loved his variable voice and tone, and I was stoked thinking that it would be cool to have a singer like him for the album. After the concert, I talked with him about the project and later sent him my songs, and he was on board immediately. The first tracks already sound great – I can’t wait to hear the whole album with his vocals!”
Lukas states as follows: “Steve told me how much he liked our gig and then we talked about his new metal project, and how he was looking for a singer.After hearing the songs, I was convinced instantly – they are extremely cool, have great melodies, and they rock hard. And we are fortunate that Epilirium’s producer, Robert, was keen to record my vocals. Folks, stay tuned, this will be very good!”
Steve Brockmann released three instrumental solo albums and a rock opera one.
It’s always a pleasure to sit and have a chat with a metal friend, especially having had a chance to work with them. Niclas Etelävuori, an amazing bass player who has been in the heart of the rhythmic part of AMORPHIS music for seventeen years, is now busy with his new band FLAT EARTH. To know more about his past and present, I had an interview with Niclas from which an excerpt can be read below:
Perhaps you agree with me that mankind is a creature of habit and seventeen years is long enough to make it difficult for any person to change or want to try new things. So I asked Niclas how he feels about those years with AMORPHIS now?
– “It was great times, it was a huge part of my life. I mean I don’t know, sometimes you just have to move on. But I have good memories and bad memories, but mostly good memories.”
In April 2017, Niclas announced his departure from AMORPHIS via a post on Facebook, where he mentioned his decision as “the hardest decision he ever made”. I asked him about it and what exactly happened during that time which led him to make that decision;
– “It wasn’t a sudden decision, it’s been growing for many years probably, five or six years but then I don’t know. I felt like things were getting just worse and people didn’t stay to their words and you know, a lot of things didn’t match. So I don’t know, I’d just had enough. We had an agreement that we do changes but it never happened. So I thought ‘this will never happen, I have to do something else’. That’s basically it in a nutshell. But it’s very complicated and a long story, it would take a week to tell it. There’s some personalities, their egos go before other things.”
FLAT EARTH, why and how was it formed? Niclas responded:
– “After a couple of weeks sitting outside drinking beer, I had to do something. Then I had this one song and my Spanish friend Juan came by and ‘yeah yeah I wanna sing on that one’, so we released this one song in Spanish with him. But I knew I had a lot of songs on my hard drive and some of them were pretty old, so I didn’t even remember what I had done. So it took weeks to listen to all of that. Then later, I started to look for somebody to play with and then Linde came up through a common friend. I liked his style always and I knew that maybe he wasn’t going to do anything after HIM finished. So then I asked him over and he was right away into it. From there on we start to look for a singer and then I have forced almost Gas to be in the band, but now he’s really into it (laughs). But Gas and I go back, we knew each other almost thirty years now. It’s all good.”
If you know AMORPHIS and if you’ve checked the FLAT EARTH single, ‘Blame’, you will also have noticed the difference in the music. So let’s see what Niclas thinks about it:
– “I feel good about it. Actually now we can do whatever we want. So it would be pointless for me to play the same music that Amorphis is doing. This is our first album and there’s a lot of different music on it already. I’m very excited when we get to play more and compose the second one.”
I was curious about the band’s name, you might be too. So I asked Niclas and he answered:
– “It was kinda from many coincidences. We had a day planned to set the name for the band at Linde’s house and it was kind of our first get together. And we were to come up with a name and we cooked food and had drinks and stuff. Linde has four hairless cats and one of them passed on as soon as we got the dinner, from a heart attack. In the end we couldn’t come up with a name that day. The next morning, we thought we have to come up with something and we had a couple of names and Flat Earth came up. Then we somehow felt that we had to give tribute to the cat, because he lost his life when we were coming up with the name. Then we also heard a story that if the earth is flat, then all the cats would shove everything off it, so we had a lot of coincidences.”
You can listen to the whole of this interview on the SoundPlayer below:
He is an amazing bass player who has always dedicated his skills and talent for the benefit of the band. There is no doubt about his role in making the legendary ACCEPT successful. Peter Baltes was born on 4 April 1958 in Solingen, Germany. He started his music career when he was young and although he claims that he is not Billy Sheehan he was voted as the number one bass player in Burrn Magazine reader’s poll of 1985.
ACCEPT are heading towards the end of ‘The Rise of Chaos’ European tour and very soon they are going to bring their music to the land of metal, Finland. Peter shares his thoughts on playing there:
“Number one is the dedication of the fans, I mean Finland is a true, true metal country. It has true metal fans and it shows every time we play, we can feel this is like something special, this is something beyond you know. It’s just, you can feel it on stage and when you talk to the fans and people.
And everybody seems to know metal – even people in the hotel, people on the street. Metal is like a high standard in Finland, which is great.”
Whenever they were active, ACCEPT have always been on a high. Great quality of music and production on their albums, along with energetic and perfect performances on stage have always been true facts about them. But what makes ACCEPT work so well?
“I think there’s a couple of factors. One of them is the songwriting part, Wolf and I have been writing these songs for so many years and we have our little quirky ways how we do it, but what comes out in the end is somehow what defines Accept, from the songwriting part.
Also, our dedication to our craft and our work ethic – we really do strive for excellence. When we play on stage we want things perfect. And at the same time trying to achieve the human aspect – that we have fun and play, that it’s not so organised. So that’s difficult for us to do, but for some reason we’re doing this very very well.”
Not many bass players dare to play a solo on stage, but Peter Baltes has done, which has always received positive feed back from the crowd.
“Well we used to do a few bass solos a couple of tours back. It’s not really about the spotlight, it’s a variety for the fans. If you’re in the audience and you see a show, in the old days there used to be a guitar solo and a drum solo. A bass solo was a little unique, but it was something cool we could offer. We decided now it would be much cooler to have some sort of battle going on instead of play a bass solo – have a little guitar bass battle with Wolf going on, which I win every night (laughs), I’m just kidding.
I’m no Billy Sheehan, I’m not very technical. But most things I play come right outta my stomach, my gut and I’m always concerned about the rhythm of things. I see the faces of the people when I play and that’s pretty cool. Most of all, it’s just I prefer playing within the band.”
Those fans who followed the band from the beginning know that Peter also did some lead vocals on tracks such as ‘Primitive’ and ‘The King” and a few more. But would it be possible that he do it again in the future?
“Probably could in the future, but never had the opportunity at this point because Mark has such a great range and has a really nice clean voice. Which back in the day was the reason I started singing a couple of ballads because we wrote some and you know, I guess almost the band pointed at me and said ‘you try it’ because they knew I was singing a little bit, ’cause back then it made sense, it was kinda cool.
We have Mark now and he’s such an excellent singer, but who knows in the future? Maybe we do something together, I’m not opposed to it, no.”
You can listen to the whole of this interview on the Audio Player below and if you would like to win a pair of tickets for the ACCEPT shows in Finland, Peter said a secret code, fill the form with that code and you’ll have a chance to be one of our lucky winners.
2017 is almost over and it has been a year full of epic metal! The MSF staff team got together and we have chosen our Top 10 albums of the year – check them out below:
Swedish heavy metallers BLACK ROSE are preparing to release a new full studio album, which is entitled “A LIGHT IN THE DARK”. The band has recently released the brand new video for ‘We come alive’, taken from the album, which is the first release featuring Jakob “Jacke” Sandberg on vocals. The video can be seen below:
“A LIGHT IN THE DARK” is mixed and mastered by Johan Gren and the artwork is created by Morgan Elswyse.
Track list for “A LIGHT IN THE DARK”: 01 – Sands of time
02 – Hear the call
03 – Carry on
04 – We come alive
05 – A light in the dark
06 – Web of lies
07 – Ain’t over ’til it’s over
08 – Powerthrone
09 – Don’t fear the fire
10 – Love into hate
BLACK ROSE are:
Jakob Sandberg – Vocals Anders Haga – Bass Peter Haga – Drums Thomas Berg – Guitar
German power metal generators, HELLOWEEN have recently revealed ‘Pumpkins United’ single via a lyric video, which can be seen below:
Nuclear Blast Records has also posted a few facts and news about the band’s Pumpkins United World Tour, check them out below:
The “Pumpkins United World Tour” is going to be raw awesomeness! The news of Andi, Michi, Kai, Weiki, Sascha, Markus, and Dani sharing the same stage has caused shock waves across the metal world. Allow us to briefly show off with some numbers: The super tour, with plenty of dates sold out for a while now, will be witnessed by more than 10,000 in Mexico City, 16,000 Brazilians will be rocking out in São Paulo, 9,000 have checked in at Santiago de Chile while in Stuttgart there’ll be 6,000; 8,000 can’t wait until the Milan show. Finally there will be ultimate mayhem at the mega show in Prague with 12,000 tickets sold as well as in Madrid with, believe it or not, 14,000 (!) Spanish Pumpkinheads. No wonder, the metal press feature hardly any other band on their cover stories, while the world’s biggest metal mag, Burrn!, dedicates an unbelievable 41-page spread to PUMPKINS UNITED. This world tour will be forever unforgettable for the entire band and far more than 100,000 HELLOWEEN maniacs all over the planet.
As we all know, HELLOWEEN is addictive – and so the boys can’t wait for the tour to start either and are making yet another sensational announcement while hunkering down in the rehearsal room: PUMPKINS UNITED are not only preparing to share the live stage, but have also written and recorded an exclusive song together. This year, Christmas and New Year’s eve happen in October, because the aptly titled track ‘Pumpkins United’ blends everything that has made this band world-famous and a true trailblazer of an own sub genre: power guitar riffs, three-part guitar solos, double bass thunderstorms, and melodic-anthemic choruses soaring above all else, performed by all three singers in the band’s history! So this track is all about maximum “UNITED feeling” and a dream hardly anyone thought would come true. And now for the cherry on top: As a thank you to all fans for a quarter of a century of HELLOWEEN mania and decades of loyalty, ‘Pumpkins United’ will be available via helloween.org from October 13 as a FREE DOWNLOAD!
PUMPKINS UNITED airlines is ready for take-off: Tour riders have been sent long since, the crew is loading the flight cases, the new track is on repeat, and the boys are properly pumped up because the eagerly awaited kick-off in Mexico on October 19 is just around the corner now. But whether you have tickets or not: We highly recommend to stay tuned – for who knows where this unbelievable PUMPKINS UNITED journey will lead to from here…
»Pumpkins United World Tour 2017/18«
19.10. MEX Monterrey – Escena *SOLD OUT*
21.10. MEX Mexico City – Arena Ciudad de Mexico
23.10. CR San Jose – BN Arena
25.10. CO Bogotá – Gran Carpa Américas
28.10. BR São Paulo – Espaço das Américas *SOLD OUT*
29.10. BR São Paulo – Espaço das Américas
31.10. BR Porto Alegre – Pepsi on Stage
02.11. RA Buenos Aires – Luna Park
03.11. RCH Santiago – Teatro Caupolican *SOLD OUT*
05.11. RCH Santiago – Teatro Caupolican *SOLD OUT*
10.11. CH Zurich – Samsung Hall
11.11. D Stuttgart – Porsche Arena *SOLD OUT*
12.11. D Munich – Zenith
14.11. UK London – o2 Brixton Academy
15.11. F Paris – Zenith
18.11. I Milan – Mediolanum Forum
20.11. NL Tilburg – 013 Poppodium
24.11. D Bochum – Ruhrcongress *SOLD OUT*
25.11. CZ Prague – Tipsport Arena *SOLD OUT*
26.11. SK Bratislava – Aegon Arena
28.11. PL Warsaw – Hala Kolo
30.11. FIN Helsinki – Black Box *SOLD OUT*
02.12. S Gothenburg – Partille Arena
04.12. D Berlin – Tempodrom
09.12. E Madrid – Wizink Center
14.12. BG Sofia – Arena Armeec
15.12. RO Bucharest – Romexpo
16.03. J Tokyo – EX Theater Roppongi
18.03. J Sapporo – Zepp
21.03. J Osaka – Zepp Bayside
23.03. J Tokyo – Zepp *SOLD OUT*
24.03. J Tokyo – Zepp *SOLD OUT*
25.03. J Nagoya – Zepp
07.04. RUS Moscow – Stadium
09.04. UA Kiev – Dvorets Sporta
Steve commented: “I am happy to announce that I’ve finally found the singer for my upcoming metal project Vision of Choice – he is the vocalist from Epilirium, Lukas Remus!
